 Hi, thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Stacy Pellecotti. I'm a registered dietitian at the University of Maryland Medical Center. I talked to you today about using the plate method for meal planning to individualize your healthy plate. March is National Nutrition Month and so it's an opportunity for all of us to take a moment and think about what we can do to make little tweaks in our diets every day to try and improve our overall health. So if you look at the plate method it tends to make it a little bit easier to try and plan out a healthy meal. And so if you divide your plate into four quarters you would put fruits and vegetables, non-starchy vegetables on half of your plate. A quarter of your plate would be proteins like meats, eggs, fish and a quarter of your plate would be grains or other starches. In addition to this you would want to include a little bit of healthy fat in all of your meals and then twice a day doing a good serving of calcium like cow's milk or a fortified milk alternative. If we look at some of our fine food examples here the way they would kind of fit onto your plate something like peas, broccoli, carrots or green beans or a green salad would fit into the vegetable section of your plate. These are very important because they help to fill you up. There are a lot of water, fiber, vitamins and minerals but not necessarily a lot of calories or energy and so they can help you feel full without eating so much energy that you end up gaining weight. Fruits would be things like grapes, berries, citrus fruit like oranges, also bananas or apples. These are also a really good source of fiber and other vitamins and minerals. Proteins would be things like you would traditionally think about like chicken, beef but also eggs either scrambled or fried and dairy products like this is cottage cheese or a hard cheese like cheddar would be very good sources of protein and then your grains or starches would be something like mashed potatoes, great bread products, pasta, pancakes. Something like beans would be a little bit of carbohydrate and a little bit of protein so they would kind of fit on both sides of this half of your plate and then some healthy fats and examples that I have for you here would be like nut butters but then also olives, avocado, olive oil those are really healthy fats. On the flip side of that some less healthy fats would be anything that's solid at room temperature so if you think about butter or palm oil or coconut oil those fats tend to be very high in saturated fats which is not good for your cardiovascular health. So when you're thinking about balancing this out if you were to try and make kind of a typical daily meal you would take your source of protein which might be chicken, a vegetable which could be broccoli, some fruit might be berries I love berries and then for a grain you might have some mac and cheese those in the right section okay and there you have a nice balanced plate and it's relatively easy to plan out your meal that way. I think one of the biggest sources of confusion about how to eat a healthy diet is terms that come up in the popular media that we call halo terms and that means that when this word gets attached to a food product all of a sudden that food product seems healthy even though it might not actually be healthy. Some good examples of halo terms would be organic, vegan, plant-based, paleo or gluten-free. All of those terms tell you information about how the food may have been prepared but don't necessarily tell you anything about how healthy the food is. For example plant-based or vegan foods mean that those foods do not include animal products such as dairy or meat. Also honey tends to be excluded from the vegan diet that doesn't necessarily mean that food is automatically healthy though there are plant-based foods that are very healthy such as fruits and vegetables and whole grains and there are foods that are plant-based that are slightly less healthy like coconut oil and so it's important to just consider about how those foods are all balancing together when deciding how you're going to plan out your meal. One of another question that I tend to get a lot is what if I can't afford organic produce or if I can't afford organic fruits and vegetables is there any point in trying to eat fruits and vegetables if they're not organic and the answer is a resounding yes fruits and vegetables are very good for your bodies like I said before they give you fiber vitamins minerals and other special nutrients that can only come from fruits and vegetables so it's important that you try and incorporate those foods into your diet if you can't afford organic that's perfectly fine also during the winter months like we're experiencing right now at the tail end of it it can be hard to find fresh fruits and vegetables um or the fresh fruits and vegetables don't taste very good because they're not in season so what about canned or frozen canned and frozen fruits and vegetables are perfectly fine they're a very good source of nutrition the things to be aware of with canned fruits and vegetables is to make sure you're avoiding added salts added fats and added sugars so for example if you're getting canned fruit you want to make sure that it's canned in fruit juice or in a no sugar added syrup if you're buying canned vegetables you want to make sure that it says no added salt on the label or if you're getting frozen vegetables try and avoid the frozen vegetables that have added sauces included with them because those can be really um high in sodium and fat which again is not very good for your cardiovascular health other halo terms like gluten free um if you look at instagram influencers or other aspects of popular culture people will tell you that gluten causes a host of ills unless you have our diagnosed with celiacs disease or uh gluten intolerance most people tolerate gluten just fine gluten is the protein that makes your bread kind of stretchy and squishy when you write into it so it's in bread products as well as pasta breakfast good uh breakfast baked goods and then also crackers anything that's made with wheat or rye will contain gluten gluten free products tend to be higher in sugar and lower in fiber than their gluten containing components and they can also be up to three times as expensive and so if you're trying to buy gluten free bread and you don't have celiacs disease you're spending a lot of money on a product that may not actually be healthier for you um paleo is another diet that i get asked about a lot um the paleo diet uh proposes that if we just eat the way our ancestors did then we will be perfectly healthy and so the people that follow this diet tend to cut out a lot of different foods so they cut out most fruits many vegetables as well as all grain products legumes uh which would include lentils and peanuts and other beans so by cutting out all of those foods you're cutting out a lot of different vitamins minerals nutrients um and there's no actual scientific evidence that you need to cut those foods out in order to be healthy um especially fruits and vegetables and beans and whole grains they're an excellent part of a healthy balanced diet and another diet that's very popular right now is the ketogenic diet um and i put that in air quotes because most people that say they follow a ketogenic diet aren't actually following a ketogenic diet um the ketogenic diet is a very high fat diet up to 80 or 90 of the energy from a ketogenic diet is provided as fat this is very useful for people with seizures that don't respond to other forms of therapy so it's an incredibly important therapeutic method for helping people manage severe chronic illnesses that's the good side of it the downside to the ketogenic diet is that because it's so high in fat you eliminate many different food products so most people that follow a keto diet aren't able to eat fruits even non-starchy vegetables can't always fit into a keto diet and so you're primarily eating proteins and fats um the problem with fat is that by eliminating most of the fruits and vegetables you're going to be cutting out many different vitamins and minerals and so people who follow a ketogenic diet for a long time need to be under the care of a qualified registered dietitian to ensure that they're still getting all of the vitamins and minerals that their bodies need to function well so we talked a little bit before about how to make a balanced diet using the plate method and so what might be different about your plate if you're following say for example a plant-based diet so earlier i had put chicken on my protein i'd had broccoli here for my vegetable for my fruit i'd done some berries and then for my grain i'd had mac and cheese so on a plant-based or vegan diet you would definitely not have the chicken as that is meat and you would also not include the mac and cheese because the cheese part is a dairy product which comes from an animal and so instead you might do something like beans as your protein and then you definitely want to include some whole grains so you might do something like toast or crackers to fill in the grain portion people who follow a plant-based diet tend to eat many more fruits and vegetables than people who follow a traditional american diet which incorporates meat so that is something that suggests that that diet could be healthier for you but you can still incorporate meat into your diet and eat a healthy diet uh the important thing is that you're balancing it with other sources of nutrition like fruits and vegetables um say for example you needed to follow a gluten-free diet how might your plate look different so remember we had chicken as our protein and mac and cheese as our grain so the chicken is fine the broccoli is fine the berries are fine any fruits and vegetables that are in their whole form aren't going to have added gluten the one thing that you would need to get rid of would definitely be the mac and cheese unless it was made with um gluten-free pasta but what you could have instead would be mashed potatoes okay so you can still use this plant this plate method of meal planning regardless what kind of diet you're on to make sure that you're still getting all of those different sources of nutrition that your body needs to stay healthy one thing another thing that I tend to have people ask me about is what do you do when you don't have access to a grocery store um how how do I still incorporate fruits and vegetables into my diet um one of the things that University of Maryland Medical Center has is spring through fall there's a farmer's market in the plaza across the street from the hospital where you can buy fruits and vegetables fresh from farmers because they're from the farmers they tend to be a little bit more affordable and they do also accept uh snap benefits and ebt really challenging sometimes to get to something like the grocery store or a farmer's market especially if you're working one two three jobs um you have a lot of demands on your time so something else you may consider would be a delivery service that brings fruits and vegetables to you Hungry Harvest is one of our community partners that provides fresh fruits and vegetables as a subscription service and hopefully this spring University of Maryland Medical Center will be able to reintroduce our mobile food market which brings fruits and vegetables into the community for protests at a significantly reduced cost so I hear the key to a diet is a great way to lose weight is that true so many people when they follow very restrictive diets will tend to lose weight um for a couple of reasons anytime you eat less energy than you burn during the day you're going to lose weight the problem with the ketogenic diet in terms of a weight loss strategy is it's not sustainable long term that means that you would go on that diet lose weight but then have to transition back to eating whole real foods in a more balanced way and people tend not to have learned the skills to eat a healthy balanced diet when they've been on the ketogenic diet and you tend to therefore see falling back into old habits and regaining most of the weight that was was lost um and like I mentioned before because the ketogenic diet is so restrictive it really should only be used under the guidance of a skilled registered dietitian because of the risk of vitamin and mineral deficiencies you're good so everybody looks for a quick fix everybody wants to lose weight super quick I've heard a couple things about metapast and optiva so metapast and optiva I'm really glad you asked about them these are diets where the you go to a company and the company provides you the foods for a specific set of time these diets can be incredibly expensive um there are also and the reason that they work and the reason that people lose so much weight is because they're very restrictive in the amount of energy that you take in during the day you will lose a lot of weight but again you're going to have to eventually transition back to eating real foods and if you haven't learned the skills to balance your plate and eat a healthy whole foods diet then you're just going to fall back into old habits and regain a lot of that weight the other risk with a very low calorie diet when you're not being supervised by a registered dietitian and or a medical professional like a doctor is that you can actually go into starvation mode where your body begins to hold on to any of the energy that you are taking in and that can actually lead to weight gain and it can slow down your metabolism and so you might stay the same weight or lose a little bit of weight on this severe calorie restriction but then when you transition back to eating more of a normal meal plan you're going to gain a significant amount of weight because now your metabolism is actually lower than it was before and so everybody kind of wants a quick fix but really when it comes to making lifestyle changes to lose weight have a healthy diet slow and steady is really the best bet because every little change you make if you make a small change that you can keep up with for a month and then another small change that you can keep up with for a month and then another one on top of that you're making little incremental changes over time and at the end of a year or five years you'll see a dramatic improvement in your health and you'll actually be nourishing your body and a healthy I hear a healthy time for Angeles Bay you maybe two three pounds a month that's healthy yeah so most people it depends a little bit on where you're starting from and if you have any other chronic health conditions that may complicate your weight loss if you do have any chronic health conditions you definitely want to talk to your physician before starting any sort of weight loss program and it's never a bad idea to try and contact a registered dietitian as well since we are the nutrition professionals but a healthy amount of weight loss is usually about half a pound to no more than two pounds in a week and so somebody who's starting off with a significant amount of weight to lose say for example a hundred pounds you may be wanting you may be able to lose about two pounds a week but somebody that's only trying to lose maybe those last 15 pounds it might be closer to half a pound a week and exercise is important too correct 100 percent nutrition is definitely one piece of the puzzle of a healthy lifestyle you absolutely as much as you can move is ideal um the average adult should be targeting about 30 minutes of activity a day to make sure that you're also keeping your body healthy so that your body's using the nutrition that you're eating thank you so much for joining me today i hope you learned a lot you can definitely go to our website for more information on everything that we talked about today in addition you can go to choosemyplate.gov for more information on the plate method of meal planning and just remember that even a little step one thing that you do today that's a little bit better than what you did yesterday can help to improve your overall health